So now we're going to talk about this other kind of ancestor and its relationship to a new discourse which is moral in character,

so the moralization of the understanding of illness and its relationship to this spiritual bureaucracy.

We'll start with a quotation from Liu Xiang 劉向,

a very famous author from the very end of the first century BC,

so from the end of the Western Han dynasty.

He says, "When a person with outstanding virtue"—here just moral virtue—

"perishes, it is because of misfortune left over from his ancestors."

Now wait a minute! "Leftover misfortune from his ancestors," yuyang 餘殃.

What does this have to do with a person of outstanding virtue perishing?

Well, it obviously means that such a good person,

he should have had a long natural life.

So if he dies young or dies in an accident or in any other unfortunate way, what's the explanation?

In other words, people are starting to try and figure out—

There's a nice phrase in modern Chinese is haoren you haobao 好人有好報, "good people have a good recompense."

So clearly that was already the idea, and yet we see that good people die young and horrible people die old.

What's going on, okay? Well, he says, well, it's leftover misfortune from the ancestors.

And then on the other hand, "When you have a reckless person who lives on, it is a result of blessings left over from the ancestors," yulie 餘烈.

And now we're going to look at a text—a Daoist text—from the second century AD, Taiping jing 太平經,

an extremely important, extremely difficult text. The—what shall I say?—

the vocabulary of it is unique and it's above all the grammar makes it extremely hard to read.

In other words, it's not one of those highly polished refined elite texts; it's a text which in fact presents itself as having been revealed, okay?

And clearly has a unique and I would say popular character to some degree, okay.

It says that to gain release, yijie 以解. Jie is like the word jiefang 解放, okay? Liberation.

But this word jie is a very very specific, has a very specific meaning all the way through Chinese religious history;

it means to be released from something which is binding you, okay?

So: to be released, but now the next term is even more important:

from "the burden of blame inherited from the ancestors."

The ancestors here are simply referred to the people who went before, xianren 先人, chengfu zhi zhe 承負之讁.

So the blame for which you can be indicted in court, as we'll see,

is the result of this blame which is inherited from the ancestors.

Clearly exactly the same idea as that expressed by Liu Xiang, leftover virtue, leftover misfortune.

But here he tells him—this is a religious text—what do you do about it when you've inherited this blame?

You've figured out that that's the cause of the trouble in your clan or your own illness.

What do you do about it? You should siguo 思過. You should "meditate on your transgressions."

And this is also characteristic precisely of the Daoist movement that survived,

which also dates to the second century AD, the so-called Tianshidao 天師道, or the Way of the Heavenly Masters,

which also says that when you're ill, you should not use medical techniques.

On the contrary, you should go inside of a quiet place and think about your sins that might be the cause of this illness.

And then you write up petitions or have somebody write them up for you,

which are addressed to three gods which are very important in the Daoist system and which we'll talk about at the very end of the session again.

They're called the sanguan 三官, that is to say the officials who govern Heaven, Earth, and the Waters under the earth,

because underground is associated with the waters that circulate.

So, tian 天, di 地, shui 水, in Chinese; Heaven, Earth, and the Waters under the earth, and each of them has its own official.

And so when you're ill you go in, you meditate on your transgressions, your faults.

You report these and the local priest will then write them up or a scribe will write them up and then the document,

these petitions will be sent to the authorities who govern Heaven, Earth, and the Waters.

The Taiping jing goes on, "There are no faults, small or great, that Heaven does not know."

So you didn't have to wait for modern video cameras on every corner to be there spying what people are doing or not doing:

Heaven knows everything.

But it's more than that: "Reports on good and evil deeds are noted down in registers,"

so everything is being recorded.

Before we talked about the recording of the ritual acts of rulers of states, sovereigns of states,

here we're talking about everybody, okay?

So: what we can say here very clearly is this extremely dense bureaucratic system which has been created to,

as a foundation for governing the empire,

has infiltrated itself into people's minds and how they imagine, how the invisible universe functions

in a very similar way, with people writing down reports on everything.

And they "are thoroughly collated," that is to say edited, "on a daily, monthly, and yearly basis,

and years are subtracted from each human's count (suan 算)," that is to say his lifespan allotment.

Okay, you were supposed to live seventy years,

but you've done this wrong and this is worth taking off two years of your life and that's worth taking off two days of your life and so on.

So it's all, a whole vast system of accounting. "Those whose evil deeds never stop then see the Gate of Demons," guimen 鬼門.

Pay close attention to that, because we'll be talking about that again.

The guimen is in this division of space; it's the corner in the northeast, which is the most vulnerable.

There's one in the northwest, which is the tianmen 天門, the Gate of Heaven,

where good influences come in and then they flow out through the southeast,

the dihu 地戶, the Door of Earth, and over across from the renmen 人門 in the southwest.

In the northeast you have the guimen,

so you go from being a human being alive to a dead person.

So this is where the dead are concentrated, that's why it's called guimen, okay?

So: when your evil deeds never stop, well that's where you're going.

Keep listening carefully: "Earth gods"—this is the modern tudigong 土地公 or she 社 that we've talked about too—

"Earth gods summon and question them to check whether their statements are in agreement with the registers.

If they're not, embittered ghosts inflict punishment on them until they admit their wrongs."

Now this is a huge change.

We've seen how these ligui, these unfortunate dead, can inflict punishment.

They can come back and zuosui, but here it has been moralized.

It's been linked to the good or evil deeds and so this unhappy dead person can now

as it were be used by this whole spiritual bureaucracy to inflict pain on those who are doing wrong and even bring them to death.

So these embittered ghosts are incorporated now into a vast bureaucratic moral system.

So, "inflict punishment on them until they admit their wrongs."

Then, "their names are transmitted to the bureau of fate for a final comparison of their records

and if their count of life is exhausted, they enter earth," that is the realm of the dead,

"and their transgressions are passed on to their descendants."

So there we see very precisely how this whole system functions,

of passing on and why you can then talk about chengfu 承負, that is to say the inherited burden.

It's because of this evil done by a previous generation which then results in an underworld attack, even a judicial attack,

and then the misfortune is passed on to the next generation.

"In addition," the text goes on, "ancestors are imprisoned."

Later on the term for hell will be diyu 地獄, literally earth prison.

"And sacrificial divination fails to discover the cause." Remember with the Chu official?

That's we saw; he performed divination to know what sacrifices he should perform.

So that's what's meant here by sacrificial divination.

"Fails to discover the cause," so if you don't know the cause, you don't know what ritual to perform, okay?

"In order to succeed, they must perform divination on the proper date"—

that is to say a reference to what later is called the tongshu 通書 or the almanac,

which tells what dates are good for doing this or that kind of ritual action.

So, you "perform the divination on a proper date, and Heaven then will grant the culprit extra time.

If in that extra time the culprit has not shown repentance and he fails to apologize to Heaven,

Heaven then orders Earth to summon his body to enter the ground and his hun spirits"—

so we can see here very clearly: we've talked about dualism, ontological dualism—

very nice again, on the elite level of the Dao and the yin and yang which are part of Dao—

but here we see that in practical terms, that the human person is divided into two components,

an earthly component and a heavenly component.

So notice it's his hun spirits who go off "to be interrogated," not in the earth prisons, but in the "heavenly prisons," tianyu 天獄.

"Then the investigation moves on to the next new member of the household,

and deaths follow one another."

So just a moment ago, we were looking at a more physical, almost like a modern infectious disease idea, cholera, whatever, epidemic, guizhu 鬼注/疰,

but here we're describing the same process of one person after another in a family being infected and dying,

we're seeing it described in purely moral terms.

So this huge bureaucracy is filing reports.

"As the reports become numerous, they are all transmitted"—of course, in a bureaucracy if the text,

the reports aren't transmitted,

then the central government has no idea what's going on.

But, "they are (passed on to) the Hall of Light," to the Mingtang.

So here we see that this key institution of the imperial sacrificial system is showing up also in the popular religion level,

and this is where everything is archived.

We saw that Wang Mang had put his ancestors in the Hall of Light, okay?

So: right around the turn of the period before and after the common era, okay?

So here it is the place of the central archives, really, of the whole moral system of the universe,

and there "they are thoroughly collated,

and the wrongdoer's family and personal names are entered in the registers by the divine clerks in charge.

When his transgressions amount to a burden"—so this is this chengfu, this burden—

"clerks inform their directors, who inform the jurisdiction of Greater yin 太陰."

So, Greater yang is ruled by the emperor,

Greater yin has its own hierarchy and someone at the top. "Officials of Greater yin,"

what do they do in response to these reports?

They "summon the wrongdoer's ancestors, and they interrogate and beat them by way of punishment."

In other words, here too we see an imitation of the earthly justice system

which in order to extort a confession will use interrogation techniques and beating, okay?

The same is going on in the underworld.

"And then order them," the ancestors, "to return to their household to tell the wrongdoer"—who is alive then, his descendants—

"that he is cursed and held accountable for the burden of the transgressions of his ancestors

And that his conviction is underway and cannot be stopped, which is why disease is being sent to him.

A household stricken with disease must gain," and there it is again, "release from the yin (jieyin 解陰)."

So that is the ancestor ghost has to be somehow, the tie between them has to be broken by an exorcism,

and that way "have the indictment," zhe 讁, "repealed."

So we can see this is totally conceived, imagined as a judicial system, so "that the sentence then will not be enforced.

Having the indictment repealed removes disease, but if the indictment is not repealed,

disease does not cease, the blame is upheld, and the sentence is enforced."

So this is the vision that the Taiping jing—I repeat, a second century AD Daoist text much of which is seen as revealed—

moralizes the whole question of disease and death in terms of the faults of the ancestors and this underworld system of justice

and the transferral of misfortune from the dead to the living as a source of disease and death.

M05.3 Ancestors, Moralization, and the Spiritual Bureaucracy

Intellectual Change in Early China: Warring States and Han

Meet the Instructors